Nobel Prize in Literature winner Annie Ernaux made a powerful statement about the situation in Gaza on June 4, 2025, on the French television program “La Grande Librairie” in the segment “Droit dans les yeux.”
Describing the violence in Gaza as genocide, Ernaux said, “For months, I’ve had this feeling growing inside me: a feeling that grows stronger every day as I watch the scenes recorded by journalists risking their lives to capture images from Gaza. Schools, buildings, and hospitals riddled with holes, children killed or maimed, an entire population fleeing bombs. I feel like there is something I should be doing but am not doing. A feeling that turns the act of writing into something worthless, even cowardly. I was writing as if I had not seen these horrific images. I was writing as if I had not read about the Gazans’ struggle to survive. Because for them, reality is no longer life but death.”
Annie Ernaux also used these striking words in her statement: “If human rights and morality have any meaning, Gaza is the place where these values must stand or die.”
300 Writers Said “Genocide”
Annie Ernaux, along with Nobel Prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, signed a statement published in the Libération newspaper on May 27, 2025, signed by a total of 300 Francophone writers.
In the statement, the writers stated, “Just as it is urgent to classify the crimes committed against civilians on October 7, 2023, as war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is also necessary to call it genocide today.” In their statement, they said, “We demand sanctions against the State of Israel more than ever before, and we call for an immediate ceasefire that guarantees the safety and justice of the Palestinians, secures the release of Israeli hostages, frees the thousands of Palestinian prisoners arbitrarily held in Israeli prisons, and puts an end to this genocide.” Last year, hundreds of people, including many writers from around the world, called for a boycott of Israeli publishers in response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
